Roller Rink Follies

Lisa directs the Children's Church. She is pictured above with her husband who just returned from several weeks of a mission trip to the Philipines. The phrase, mission trip, doesn't do justice to the amount of teaching, training, preaching and worship leading that Tracy accomplished.

In the meantime Lisa decided to have a back-to-school bash at the roller rink.

My children misheard the word bash as crash. We don't roller skate down here on dirt roads and we land in water when we fall.

Oddly enough big ole Joey was, by far, the lightest on his feet, certainly the most coordinated.

The other 24 kids spent most of the two hours lying prone on the floor of the rink or flying through mid-air. It was too dark to take pictures but that is just as well.

Babe's Big Adventure

We had a frightening thunderstorm the other night that blew out our power (which means 25 kids and no way to get water out of the well), exploded the base of a cordless phone at Sarah's house and left her without cable for 72 hours. The same storm sadly killed Yolie's dog, Zeus, and sent two of my dogs into crazyland where they thought they could jump through a plate glass door. One dog, Babe, just flat out disappeared, one knocked open the back door and hid under Jose's bed, and the one fairly smart one hid in the garage.

The next morning after Yolie called me about Zeus I decided to hunt for my missing dog. We found her wedged tightly under a very low deck out the back door. Joey started digging while trying to not dislodge the daylilies and astilbe in that bed. Martin dug out the other end and crawled on his belly under the deck that drags the ground while I pointed my finger and barked stupid orders. The boys so already had it under control what with their peanut gallery of Bubbas and Bubbettes making goofy suggestions and generally gumming up the works.

Finally they reached the shell-shocked dog and kept digging until they got her out.
That was three days ago and she still has an odd look in her eyes.

40 Years of Friendship

There are very few people who knew me when I was childless, considering that my oldest child will be 32 this fall.

Nearly 40 years ago in the lunchroom of a junior high school I met my friend Barbara and we have managed to make the friendship last since the late 1960s.

It would be a book, not a blog, to detail all the events that we have been through but it is comforting now that I'm in my 50s to have someone who knew me as a pre-teen, a teenager, through pregnancy and child rasing, through marriages and now we are both grandmas. It's kind of staggering actually.

We grew up spending the night at each others houses constantly, she knows my past that is strictly off limits for discussion, she knows my secrets and keeps them for me. She knows the stupid stuff I've done and I'll be equally quiet on her behalf.

We lived near each other both in Virginia and in Louisiana and we've camped together often before I had so many kids. Sarah and I hauled it fast back to Louisiana one time for a very painful double funeral when Barbara needed me to be there with her.

She slipped and called Sarah,my oldest daughter, by my late sister's name. She caught herself and pointed out that Sarah now reminds her much of Ellen. Barbara knew Ellen since she was a child, she knows my brothers and my parents. Barbara remembers my grandparents who've been gone for decades. In today's day and time, this is increasingly unusual as we seem to lose so many connections that we once had with people.

When Barbara and her sweet, handsome husband left Sunday I told her I loved her. Since Ellen died I have been much more open about my love for friends and family since I have lost many people I have loved way too early.

Of course this reminds me painfully of how much my other children have lost in their past and in their childhoods before I adopted them. These connections with people are absolutely vital and to be treasured.

I'm grateful to have been friend with Barbara for so long and it's going to be cool to be around with her when her kids and mine are grand-parents, since many are now already parents.

Feeling sheepish

After my tirade about the miseries of foot shopping, it is with a changed heart that I blog today.

Since this is no-sales tax weekend ($35.00 savings) and my 10% 8 a.m. early-bird discount ($48.00 savings) plus I won the doorprize $25.00 gift card AND all shoes were buy one, get one at 50% off. I mananged to buy 18 pairs of name brand like Nike and New Balance shoes in 45 minutes time with 8 kids jabbering at me for $409.00. Fcator in the other shoes already purchased, I got it all done for $500.00.

Then for the 4 day no sales tax event we went to Wal-Mart with 6 other of my kids and got almost all of the school supplies. Each of the 24 school-age kids has an entire sheet of required supplies so this was no small feat.

Empty and Quiet

When everyone is sleeping.

Leaving my front porch

If I have to I will leave my front porch. If Daniel is turning 18 and Chuck is driving Daniel, Yolie and I to a Braves game I'll leave my front porch. That was 2 years ago but I reemember each and every Braves game that I attend.

A Tour Guide in Hell

I used to work with the most hilarious officer on the force. He claimed that being twice married qualified him to now be a tour guide in Hell.

Well try going shoe shopping with school-age kids. So far I have purchased 4 out of the 25 pairs that we need by August 8th. The hard part is not taking all the kids with me, I am the hard part. I HATE TO GO. Shoe stores are my idea of hell. My eyes water from the dye used in new stuff, my skin itches, my patience is nil and my blood pressure exceeds my boredom threshold all at one time. I can barely maintain my Christian witness, my civility is threatened and my eyes glaze over the minute I get out of the van.

Sarah took Vanessa and Miriam already. Thank God. The only thing worse than the 21 I haven't done would be to go with two teenage girls who squeal about "cute shoes". Jeepers. Yolie used to take them but CJ is demanding 110% of her attention. Sarah's son, Ray, is all too happy to share his mom as he is such a social butterfly lately. Ray loves to go places with my kids.

So tomorrow is the start of a tax free weekend, I have a coupon that must be used between 8 and 10 a.m. and this particular annoying store is featuring a buy one, get one half price. The last time we went which was the beginning of last school year the dern store wouldn't total everything up and then figure it out but rather I had to keep getting back in line and paying separately for each double pair of shoes. I nearly lost my slim hold on reality.

My blog tomorrow will probably just feature me spluttering about my awful day in a store. I can hardly calm down now so distressed am I by the thought of making two trips of ten or so kids each time or just scaring the snot out of the store by us all showing up at once. Either way I will need to be medicated, committed, or healed at the altar about my crappy shoe-shopping attitude.

Get your energy out!

Because I have been blessed with monumental reserves of energy that I must deplete every night or I will never get to sleep, I also think that my kids need to get their energy out each day also or they will be irritable and explosive.

We have a fitness room full of used equipment that I'm very grateful for. We have worn out FOUR trampolines in ten years time. Worn them out so completely so that not even the springs were re-usable.

Several hours are spent each day in the pool, soccer matches and kickball games go on in the meadow, bikes are ridden, skateboards and scooters fly down bumpy dirt roads but my kids are tired each and every night.

CW, Elvis, Dirt Roads and creeks

Living down the ruttiest dirt road in the south is surely my idea of Heaven. CW loves having our five dogs plus Sarah's dogs, Ruby, Roscoe and Elvis to romp along with while picking bleberries. They have to pass a creek that inevitably someone falls or gets pushed in but how could summertime be any better?

Today's Blueberry Adventure

First thing this morning a buch of kids were begging to go blueberry picking. Vanessa chose Martin, Sabrina, Mayra, CW. Allen and Fabian.

She claims that CW can't go next time because he brought along Sarah's dumb dog Elvis.

Tabby and Nando are worse than Big Mama when it comes to over-eating blueberries.

Big Mama is a piglet

Just three short years ago I had a profession and I got dressed each day to go to work. I was in the public school system for 25 years and here is my last school picture.

Now I eat out of a 6 pound bucket of blueberries on the sofa surrounded by undone paperwork.

Life is great!

Lycopene

Sarah was reading out loud from her Cooking Light magazine the other day. She read that women with very high levels of lycopene in their blood greatly reduce their risk of cardiovascular diseases. Since my goal is to live past 100 years of age I find this info fascinating.

I need to live that long to even get half of what I want, and plan to do, done.

Lyopene is found in tomatoes, pink grapefruit and watermelon...I'd eat tons of this anyway. The trick is to get my kids to choose good food. To join the Real Food Revolution. It's not that difficult actually. I've found that kids will eat grape and cherry tomatoes right off the vine. I keep fresh tomatoes on the kitchen counter and they are gobbled up. Paloma loves to grab a bucket and go out to pick tomatoes. A watermelon is eaten in one sitting here, my family could easily chow down 4 watermelons after supper. I pay big money for citrus in the winter, somehow it makes me feel sunny and Florida-like when it is cold outside.

Interestingly enough as I type this my mom just came over at 7 am to tell me she was running to the grocery store for tumeric so she could make pickles. My mouth is watering.

Power of Food

I am getting obsessed with food it appears. I just got my new issue of The Mother Earth News. I have read this magazine for 30 years or so.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote an absorbing article about the power of food entitled "Lily's chickens". She also has been deeply influenced by Eliot Coleman and Joan Dye Gussow.

One of my goals in life is to grow as much food as is possible which reminds me of yet another very influential author Rosalind Creasey and her book about edible landscaping.

My huge pantry is full of food and for that I am grateful but now that I am retired and not going to add any more children through adoptions I want to replace all the boxes, cans and bags with mason jars full of garden produce. I used to try and make sure that I had quarts of jalapenos, peaches, tomatoes, green beans and pickles for the winter but as my family grew, I simply could not find time to put up the bounty from the garden...plus we ate most of it as fast as I could grow it.

Chuy, Paloma and I ate every single fresh fig last year off several huge fig bushes so last winter I planted several more bushes and hopefully I'll put up some fig preserves.

I've had kids (it was The Biggers actually) get off the school bus, tear out to the big garden and stuff strawberries straight into their mouths without the usual at least carry it into the kitchen routine. I myself have eaten a good 20 pounds of fresh blueberries in the last couple of weeks. That means I'd have to grow a boatload more if I wanted to freeze any for the winter.

So this will be my lofty goal, to GREATLY increase food production and food preservation.

I'm quoting from Kingsolver here, "Every quarter pound of hamburger was produced via 100 gallons of water, 1.2 pounds of grain, a cup of gasoline, greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to those produced by a six-mile drive in your average car, and the loss of 1.25 pounds of topsoil, every inch of which took 500 years for the microbes and earthworms to build. How can all this cost less than a dollar, and who is supposed to pay for the rest of it?"

This just cements my resolve to live and eat as simply and as sustainably as is possible.

Vanessa's pictures

Vanessa keeps scanning old pics and taking new ones each day. When I go to blog I find that she has deposited a huge selection for me in my picture files.

This morning when I went outside to fry in the garden, Vanessa captured a moment with Allen and our dog Babe.

I did get to work outside for an hour until I was totally drenched in sweat. My banana peppers are producing finally but the bell and the jalapeno peppers need some drier heat. It has been as wet, rainy and as humid as the Phillipines lately.

CJ

CJ at nearly one month old.

Alyssa, Tameshia and Cristy

We love our pool

We spend 2-4 hours each day for about half the year at the pool. I am ALWAYS the lifeguard unless I have several grown folks up there to be ME.

More pool shots

Action Shots